Alice, the heroine of the last of these three novellas, 'The Elephant God', a young American woman on a train, feels that Indian novels haven't adequately prepared her for the experience of India. 'Where were the big, fruitful families from these novels, where were the jokes, the love affairs, the lavish marriage ceremonies, the solemn pieties, the virtuous peasants, the environmentalists, the musicians, the magic, the plausible young men?' Earlier in the book, what is implied here would have seemed sheer megalomania - that an outsider like Paul Theroux can paint a more accurate picture of India here and now than the natives can manage. By this stage, though, if the point hasn't been proved, exactly, then at least it seems a possibility.

Theroux's subject is Americans in India, just as Henry James's was Americans in Europe. The difference is that these modern travellers are seeking to be open only to preselected aspects of their new surroundings. Theirs isn't a Grand Tour, but a narrow one. India overwhelms them anyway. The couple in the first novella, 'Monkey Hill', enjoying a health spa in the foothills of the Himalayas, politely order the Indian options from the menu and feel the benefit of their yoga classes, but only reluctantly become aware of another way of life, in the smoky village just out of sight, smelling of scorched dirt and excrement.

Dwight, the hero of the second novella, 'The Gateway of India', a businessman arranging outsourcing deals, opts for an even more filtered India, spending all his leisure time in his hotel (in the Elephanta Suite of the book's title) and eating tuna out of a can rather than trust anything prepared locally. He can see the Mumbai landmark called the Gateway of India from his hotel window and he thinks that's sightseeing enough. Even the Alice of the third novella wants her experience of enlightenment restricted to the refuge of Sai Baba's ashram near Bangalore. There are things she doesn't want to know.

The presiding images of the book are the monkey and the elephant, Hanuman and Ganesh. The monkey inevitably represents our baser nature and the rule of instinct, the elephant, despite its genetic remoteness from us, a higher preoccupation. Yet the elephant also has a double nature, as a story told in the first novella indicates, about a man confronted with a stampede. The lead elephant made straight for him, lowering his tusks, but the intention was protective, to save him with barriers of ivory from the trampling of the other beasts. The man wasn't touched, but died of shock anyway, safe between the elephant's tusks.

The first novella is the weakest because the element of doubling, of symmetry and opposition, seems more like a practised novelist's reflex than the product of fresh insight. Husband and wife are each sexually attracted to massage therapists working at the spa. The irony is that the husband, a seasoned philanderer, holds back from lovely Anna, while the wife gives in to handsome Satish despite her long history of fidelity. India becomes mere background to a marital drama and comes into focus again only with a violent and arbitrary denouement.

In the other novellas, the protagonists are solitaries who form odd (and involuntary) couples with Indian men. Dwight Huntsinger in 'The Gateway of India' becomes sexually entangled, first with a child prostitute and then with a girl who works part-time in a hair and nail salon. He ends up supporting her and (as he gradually realises) a growing population of people from her village. But his real counterpart is his junior colleague, Mr Shah, who seems to care for nothing but the fine print on outsourcing contracts. In fact, he is a Jain, so intent on not taking life that he will only eat an apple that has fallen off the tree without being picked and won't drink from a bedside glass of water in case he swallows insects that have landed on it.

By comparison, Dwight comes to feel himself compromised, not just by his appetites but by the whole enterprise in which he is engaged, getting Indians to make things cheaply, with no restrictions on pollution. This materialist becomes ripe for some sort of conversion.

The strength of the story, though, is that Mr Shah, too, is irreversibly changed. After a spell in the States, Shah starts wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and seems insulted by the playful suggestion that it was probably made in India, saying fiercely: 'Italian made. Very good weave.' He is still adamant about respecting life, but seems to respect Harvard even more.

In 'The Elephant God', Alice is more catastrophically partnered. Life in the ashram is wonderful and she does menial tasks with a whole heart, but it's not only in business contracts that there is fine print. She is expected to contribute financially as well, so she starts teaching American idioms and intonations to call-centre workers in Bangalore. She has a talent for this, but is dismayed by the results. She feels Indians are naturally confrontational, but that the subtlety of Hindi and the quaintness of British English have softened their manners in the past. Now her teaching brings out the lurking aggression and she must reckon with it.

Her nemesis is Amitabh, a plump, well-spoken man she met on the train to Bangalore, the very one who helped her get a job at InfoTech in Electronics City. But now he says: 'So who am I talking to?' rather than: 'Can you please inform me, what is your good name, madam?', and he can't be put off or reasoned with. He's living in two cultures and two centuries, which means in practice that he is planning to make an arranged marriage but sees no reason to leave a vulnerable woman alone. He, too, must pay a price. There are no catalysts in these stories, agents of change who escape transformation themselves, and the timelessness of India is revealed as a thing of the past.